


Ouroboros

by garcconne



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: 19 year old Shiro, Canon Divergent, Galaxy Garrison, M/M, Mutual Pining, Post Season 6, Pre-Kerberos Mission, Time Travel, but our regular Shiro too
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-10
Updated: 2018-09-10
Packaged: 2019-07-10 16:00:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15952733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/garcconne/pseuds/garcconne
Summary: Post S6 roadtrip. The team lands on an unknown planet where Keith ends up coming in contact with a mysterious object that throws him back years into his past.On Earth, Takashi Shirogane is a newly graduated officer from Galaxy Garrison. He hasn’t yet been on that fateful recruitment drive where he’ll meet a young Keith for the very first time. He has no knowledge of the tragic Kerberos mission he will pilot and the suffering in store for him. Instead he finds a man in the desert with a scarred face, who seems to know him better than anyone ever has.





	Ouroboros

**Planet Earth, Sector 246801**

 

For Shiro, there’s nothing that rivals speeding through the desert on his hoverbike. The desert surrounding Galaxy Garrison stretches out for miles on miles before him, curving up into towering mesas and deep ravines, not another soul in sight. Here he can lose himself with no flight crew in his ear, no senior officers watching.

He hits that accelerator so hard that he feels like he’s on the verge of flying off his seat, relishing the sensation of hot wind and sand whipping through his hair, biting at his exposed face, his ears drowning in the roar of propellers.

Out here the only race he’s winning is against himself; following well-worn racing lines, eager to beat previous times only he knows and has kept records of, tucked away in pencil on the back covers of old textbooks. Shiro thinks of the many beds he's lived in throughout his childhood, innumerable posts littered with numbered notches of various times: 3rd place at a track and field race, 95% on a physics paper, 1st place at a flight simulator arcade game. But his bed at the Garrison is forged from aluminum and steel and regularly monitored during hall checks. So he finds other ways to keep score.

The numbers remind him of everything he’s achieved in his life to date, they remind him of how much further he has left to go. He swerves around sharp corners, flying right up against a cliff’s edge, giving one final push and drops.

They tell him he’s the best pilot the Garrison has seen in a near decade.

There’s a long pinboard in the rec room. On one side run the numbers one to fifty and next to them are names emblazoned in black, underneath those names is a year, and opposite those names is a number out of a hundred. No one knows who started it but it’s become a permanent fixture in Garrison lore, those pilots and prospective pilots whose names graced that list  _and stayed there_ , becoming figures akin to local legends out of the hundreds of students to have graduated from its halls.

Shiro’s name sits at the top, fifteen points higher than second place, and has remained there since his second year as a cadet. _Galaxy Garrison’s new golden boy_ , they call him, a natural prodigy in the simulator. He won’t lie and say he doesn’t relish in his untouchable status; pride is a guilty pleasure he indulges in. _But,_ he thinks, winning at a programmed imitation of flight is incomparable to what he truly wants.

Before he lets himself slam down, down into the earth, he pedals hard once more, eyes glinting behind dusty goggles.

 

* * *

 

 

One of the best things about promotion is his pushed back curfew. When he’s done flying, with just enough fuel to get him back to where he needs to be, he finds his spot to lean against a rocky perch underneath a vast night sky untouched by light pollution, entire galaxies spilling out above him.

Tonight a full moon hangs low and he traces its outline with an outstretched finger, unable to hold in the manic expression on his face. An assignment, his first _space_ assignment, in six months time to the Artemis space station on the other side of the moon. Even Iverson couldn’t hide the telling twitch in his jaw when he told Shiro to _wipe the smug look off his face_  the day he found out about his selection.

 _Youngest pilot to man a lunar mission._ News of it spread through the Garrison like wildfire and before he knew it, he could hear his name on the lips of officers he’d never spoken to, been on the receiving end of wide-eyed stares of cadets in the cafeteria.

_Of course they would choose him, who else?_

But then there were the murmurs from senior staff, pilots with experience, those older and waiting their turn.

_He’s only going because Samuel Holt is friends with his parents._

_You know he cheated those sim scores._

_Besides, when has being good at a sim ever been enough to be qualified for the real thing? You need real space flight experience for that._

But no jealous looks or hushed gossip could bring him down. He was going to _space._

He closes his eyes for a moment and dreams of zero gravity, the soft sound of his own breathing inside an astrosuit, and being enveloped by a sea of stars.

 

* * *

 

 

He doesn’t think twice when he first spots it. A blinking light in the sky, indistinguishable from the fighter jets that fly out from the Garrison’s companion air base, running through training sequences above him.

But the second time he catches it, one foot slung over his bike and about to head back to base, he realises something about it is awry. The way it grows larger as it draws closer in a completely unfamiliar trajectory, its speed uncanny.

Shiro realises that it’s hurtling towards Earth, burning white-hot, dangerous and out of control. He turns the ignition on his bike, eyes trained on the spot on the horizon where he knows it’ll crash.

And before he lets the rational side of him take over, the voice of reason telling him he’ll get in trouble for this somehow, that whoever it is inside that plane won’t survive the explosion, before he can let that voice persuade him,  he’s racing off into the distance, leaving behind a plume of dust and exhaust fumes.

  


* * *

 

 

What he finds at the crash site is beyond anything he could imagine. Flames flicker into the night sky around the form of what is the oddest ship Shiro’s ever seen, something from a Saturday morning cartoon. An enormous lion painted black and white, wings jutting out of its back, with claws and _eyes_. It looks nothing like any Garrison ship. It looks nothing like any ship from anywhere on Earth.

A tiny, wondrous voice in the back of his head whispers: _aliens._

Against his better judgment, Shiro approaches, straight through the fire.

He should be more afraid of the fire, of whatever piloted this _thing_ , but something about the lion feels familiar, straight out of a childhood fever dream. He walks right up to its muzzle and reaches out, his hands stretched over warm metal -

And those huge eyes light up a brilliant blue. The lion lifts itself off ground, towering over him as it shakes off any clinging fire, opens its maw and _roars._

His breath catches in his chest, his heart nearly comes to a stop. He knows he needs to run, but he doesn’t.

Then, as suddenly as it woke up, the light from its eyes winks out, and it collapses onto its forelegs, mouth still agape.

 _Oh,_ he thinks, _it’s a doorway_. The interior of the mouth extends like a tunnel and Shiro lets his curiosity lead him, entering into the darkness.

 

* * *

 

 

Whatever power the lion ran on appears to have gone, he thinks, as he lifts the manual lever on the door leading to what he hopes is its cockpit. _Was there a pilot? Surely there was._ But a space lion ship was beyond any Garrison protocol, and a niggling sensation tells him it’s sentient, watching him even as he wanders about inside of it.

To his relief, there is a cockpit. And it appears, the lion does indeed have a pilot.

There’s a young man in the seat dressed head to toe in red and white armour. He’s passed out and wearing no helmet, and Shiro moves in to take a closer look.

His second thought is that he’s _beautiful_. It’s an entirely inappropriate thought, given the situation. With his shaggy dark hair, long lashes, and a wide scar stretched across his right cheek, he’s human in all appearances. Shiro wonders what on earth he’s doing in an alien spaceship.

He leans over and places a hand on his shoulder, and seeing no obvious injury, he gently attempts to shake him awake. No response. He checks for a pulse, and feels one, faint but steady.

With little effort, Shiro hauls him up with one arm into a fireman’s carry, and lifts him out of the lion.

  


* * *

 

 

There are a million thoughts running through Shiro’s head as he lays the pilot down, resting his head under his folded leather jacket as a makeshift pillow. He really ought to head back to the Garrison and report this. He’s certain that they’ve registered the crash and that a retrieval crew is probably on its way, ready to wrap the lion and its pilot behind red tape and away from prying eyes. If they find him here he’ll most likely land himself in trouble.

Trouble he can’t afford to be in, if he wants to remain on the Artemis mission. Or at the Garrison at all.

Below him he hears a soft groan. The pilot has begun to stir, and he’s looking up at him with widened eyes.

 _They’re blue_.

He tries to give him his best attempt at a reassuring smile.

“Are you alright?” He asks him.

“Shiro?” the man says, before promptly fainting in his arms.

  


* * *

* * *

 

  


**Unknown Space, Sector 934563**

  


Flying without the Castle of Lions had turned out to be one of the biggest challenges the team had face yet. Morale and power in the fuel core of their lions had already been running low ten quintents ago, and now they were at a critical point.

“We need to find somewhere to land,” Pidge said, voice crackling over the comms, her face a broken jumble of jagged lines.  

“Yeah yellow’s _this_ close to shutting down,” added Hunk. “And are we even heading in the right direction? What quadrant are we in? These maps seem super old.”

Finding coordinates to Earth in a universe largely unaware of the existence of their tiny, backwater planet, had been the real challenge. Without the Castle, contacting their allies had become nigh impossible. Keith thought of the Blades, and swallowed the bitterness of an apology lingering in the back of his throat. Kolivan would be furious with him and Krolia both, without a report from either for many a quintent, and it felt even worse for Keith when he realised it had been over two years for him since he’d spoken to the leader of the Blades.

Their first choice had been between Olkarion and Earth.

They’d chosen Earth due to Sam Holt and the castle plans, but as space travel dragged on, he realised they were drastically unprepared for the long, arduous journey home. Without the wormholes they were finding themselves drifting through pockets of darkspace without anywhere to rest in sight.

He checked the power levels for his lion and re-inspected their flight trajectory. Hunk was right; nothing in their current star system was familiar, and with the shattered state of the universe post Lotor’s ascension and fall, he had no clue what constituted as safe or dangerous territory at all let alone somewhere safe enough to land and rest.

“Lance, Allura -  how’re you guys holding up?”

More buzzing and crackling. The interference in their comm lines was like a warning sign for worse systems failures to come.

“I’m doing fine for the moment -” Lance’s voice came in, fell to a choppy halt, and resumed, “but Red’s running real low as well.”

Allura cut in, “Keith. I agree with Pidge, we should find somewhere to land and rest the Lions.”

Keith looked over at his power panel again, dropping dangerously low in bars. Curled up on the cockpit floor next to him, Kosmo raised his head to give him an unblinking stare.

“Alright. But where to now?”

 

* * *

 

 

  
He entered the cabin as quietly as he could. Every time he rested his eyes on Shiro’s figure he felt a load in his chest lighten, a sudden wash of relief, as if it hadn’t quite hit him yet that the man could be alive, safe, _himself_ and nearby.

There was an uncertain intimacy to their interactions now, unnegotiated boundaries in the aftermath of their fight at the clone station. Too much had happened too fast. Their fight, nearly dying together hand in hand, getting _saved_ by the ghost of Shiro, fighting Lotor, restoring Shiro to his body, and nearly losing him again. His heart was exhausted, and he was sure that what he felt was nothing in comparison to what Shiro must be going through.

Having a long overdue talk about their personal traumas was difficult when they were both tired, and stuck in close quarters with his mother and teleporting space wolf who seemed to have the worst timing.

Even being in a room alone with the other man was overwhelming for him. He sat down near the foot of the bed, watching Shiro’s lax mouth and softened brow, a gentle expression so rarely seen when he slept due to the nightmares that Keith knew plagued him, now more than ever. It took him a few minutes to stir awake and notice him.

“How’re you feeling?” he said.

With a groan, Shiro responded, “could be better. It’s weird, being in a physical body again.”

“I bet,” Keith said, with a hesitant smile.

Shiro sat up against the headboard with a resigned thunk, one arm curled around his stomach, and answered with a weak grin of his own. They stared at each other, lost for words. There was so much Keith wanted to say, so much he wanted to ask. _Do you have the memories of the clone? Do you remember our fight? Do you remember what I told you then, with your blade digging into my cheek -_

He shuffled up the bed until they were close. Everything he wanted to say seemed stuck in his chest in a hardened bubble that threatened to burst with an onslaught of every feeling he’d kept repressed, for the sake of their mission, for Shiro’s sake, so he wouldn’t be a burden, so that things could remain as they were.

“Shiro, I -”

Wordless and knowing, Shiro brought his hand up, hovering over his face as if he were afraid to touch before gently cupping his scarred cheek. Keith held his breath, before letting out a long sigh of relief and leaning in, allowing Shiro to trace the fresh, ragged edges of his scar with a calloused thumb.

“I’m so, sorry,” he whispered.

They’d always been physically affectionate with one another but something about this seemed different.

He turned his head, the corner of his lips pressed into Shiro’s palm, almost like a kiss but not quite at all. A loaded silence hung over the tops of their heads, and Keith knew he had to bite the bullet and _speak_ before everything else in their lives would come crashing down on their shoulders.

But saying the right thing had never been his strong suit, had it.

“The lions are running low, we’re landing them soon. Just wanted to tell you, that’s all.”

“Right,” Shiro replied. His hand dropped like lead, and Keith had to restrain himself from chasing its touch. “Keith, can we talk about what you - what you said to me at the station? I don’t even know if I’m remembering it right-”  

It took everything in his power to suppress the jolt of fear coursing through his system.  There was no one else in the universe he could read better than Shiro, but there were sides of him he’d never had the opportunity to witness, because whatever they’d had between them was supposed to be _safe._ Keith wondered whether overstepping the carefully drawn lines of their friendship into the realm of unrequited desire was included as an exception clause when he’d once told him, ‘ _I will never give up on you’._

After all this time there were still things he couldn’t be brave about. Telling Shiro that he loves him for a second time was a code red fire even he wouldn’t dare jump into.

“You should rest. I’ll be in the cockpit. When you’re ready you should come join me, the others will be glad to hear your voice,” Keith said, standing up rapidly without meeting Shiro’s eyes.

Keith left the compartment with a stone weight weighing down his heart, refusing to turn back and face whatever hurt he was certain he was bound to receive.

  


* * *

 

 

The planet they ended up landing on was covered entirely in dense jungle, shrouded in heavy, greenish fog and filled with swampy water. In Lance’s words, it was ' _hella creepy'._

There was no sign of the Galra or any kind of civilisation at all, as far as their sensors could go, but then their sensors were struggling to pick up any signal with the gaseous, humid air clinging like thick molasses onto everything.

“Well, it’s lifeform dense,” Hunk said, squinting at a low-hanging, leafy purple vine, “so our dinner tonight will be fresh at least?”

Allura sat on a nearby log, her normally silky hair had gained double its volume in the heat. She wiped away at the mud sticking to her boots, pulling off an inch-long leech with a grimace.

“It feels like we’re being watched by a dozen eyes right now.”

“Yup, gotta agree. This place feels _haunted,_ ” Lance said, wiping sweat off his brow with the back of his hand, settling on the log and brushing shoulders with Allura.

It had been a struggle finding landing zones for their lions in relative proximity to one another. Instead they’d had to settle for leaving them wherever they could find a clearing, nearly all of the lions left safeguarded by a passenger, all except for Green.

The green lion lay on its hind legs, body shrouded with tall ferns and draping branches.

Pidge emerged from her lion’s mouth, glasses tucked back into her hair, the top half of her armour undone to her waist.

“Well guys we’ve got about a varga left while Green finishes charging up, and it’s gonna be about the same for the others” she said, landing on the soft earth with a thump.

Her news was met with a collective explosion of grumbling, their voices rising above the low din of fauna all around them. It was with significant effort that they came to an agreement about _something_ , something being a fire, not for the warmth but for some light to brighten up the gloominess surrounding them.

Standing on a mangled root that rose out of the muddy waters and onto the shore, Keith surveyed his surroundings absent-mindedly, barely registering his arguing crew or the jungle about him. Regardless of any distraction, it was impossible to keep his thoughts from circling back to Shiro, his heart and head falling into their steady orbit around the other man.

Not even putting physical space between them was enough for Keith to extricate himself from his thick knot of feelings. He stared down at the black bayard in his hand, its slightly heavier weight still unnatural to him as the recurring realisation that he was now Black’s pilot, and that Shiro wouldn’t return to his post as leader.  

But then like a sharp knife cutting through his thoughts, he felt it.

A sensation that sent the hair on his neck standing, singing through the surface of his skin and sent him reeling backwards. He wildly turned around, stumbling to stay steady on two feet, and met Allura’s equally panicked gaze across the clearing.

“Did you feel -”

“Yeah, I - ”

The rest of their group watched their exchange with some certain alarm.

It was the same feeling he’d had on Earth when he’d heard the call of the blue lion’s quintessence, an aching tug towards something unnamable. Except it was far, far stronger out here, less of a tug and more a fist grabbing him by the scruff of his neck.

He faced the murky swamp and closed his eyes, listening to his other senses.

“There,” he said, pointing downriver. “It’s coming from there.”

  


* * *

 

 

In the end, neither he nor Allura managed to convince the others to follow the path leading to the _call_ to its conclusion. _Must be something rich in quintessence_ , Pidge had said. Although it was hard to know with most of their equipment out of order.

Hunk remained at camp as Lance and Pidge stood watch at the cavemouth him and Allura had found.

Strange rainbows danced in the oily slick of the muddy waters rippling around their thighs as they sloshed forwards through the cave’s entrance. Keith’s eyes adjusted to the growing dimness, the light of his bayard doing little to abate the shadows.

It wasn’t dark enough however, to hide rows upon rows of carvings in an unknown tongue, unfurling all around them like ribbons on the cave walls, pulling him deeper inwards. The steady pulse of unknown quintessence kept pace with his heartbeat, the sound of it flooding his ears. Behind him, he heard Allura stop in her path.

“I don’t think we should keep going,” she said, fear palpable in her voice.

The others had made the same sentiment clear back at camp. He’d shut down their protests.

“If you don’t want to come with me, then that’s fine. Go wait outside.”

“Wait - Keith!”

As he ventured further in, the space seemed to shrink with him, its roof and walls closing in until the passage could only fit the width of his body.

Swallowed up by shadows, he began to hear things.

_Whirring propellers from a familiar hover bike. Low laughter, warm and rich._

The swamp water was now up to his hips, warm and unnaturally still.

_Hot leather and cool, dry air filling his lungs. Stars falling like snow in the unending night around them._

_“Keith, promise me you’ll be here when I get back”_

He took in a shuddery breath, trying his best to shake away the visions. He couldn’t afford to be distracted in such a place.

_“Of course, where else would I be?”_

Inky blackness soon gave way to a dim grey wash of above ground light, filtering in from some unknown source. The ground rose to a slow slope above the water, bumpy with thick, winding tree roots that coalesced into a kind of altar.

Upon that altar lay a stone box. It appeared to be the source of whatever plagued him, a sensation now reverberating at an intensity that had Keith gritting his teeth and blinking away blurry circles.

Something about it felt like it was meant for him to find, and him alone. He drew closer, the sound of his wading echoing through the small space.

Similar characters from the cave walls littered the box’s surface, and as Keith ghosted his fingers over the writing, they began shifting under his touch, warping into English.

‘ _Lay your heart/_

_Here on this shrine/_

_Let the past/_

_Reveal your future’_

He had little patience for riddles. With careful hands, he pried open the lid.

Inside was what he could only describe as a mound of flesh, uncannily akin to a human heart but not similar in size or shape at all, beating away as if it were _alive_. There was a stone at its centre, bound with wiring, glowing steadily brighter and brighter until its light consumed everything in his line of sight -

The ground dropped beneath his feet, vanishing along with the walls, water, _everything._ He gasped for air that wasn’t there.

 _Perhaps going in alone wasn’t the wisest course of action_ , he thought, as reality collapsed all around him.

 

**Author's Note:**

> So I started this before s7 and abandoned it because I couldn't figure out how to incorporate new information about pre-Kerberos Shiro and Keith into this! But a month later and I've found a way. My favourite headcanon is that Shiro was naturally drawn to Keith because he also grew up in the foster care system.


End file.
